Donahoe said on “CBS This Morning,” “What we’re facing now is our own fiscal cliff in this lame duck session. It’s hard. I’ll tell you — all the fiscal cliff (in the news). Hey talk about us a little bit. We have our own fiscal cliff. If they act now, we’ll get this whole thing behind us and we can be profitable and then focus on growing the postal business.”

In order to improve the organization’s financial situation, Donahoe said on “CBS This Morning” that he’s asking Congress to refinance retiree health benefits and eliminate Saturday delivery of mail. He said, “We’re not asking to get dug out from under, we’re taking the responsibility of doing it, but rather than pay $5.5 billion a year we think we should be paying around a billion a year (in retiree health benefits). The second thing we want to do is eliminate Saturday delivery of mail, not packages, just mail. So we would have post offices open Saturday and we would still have package delivery.”

The Post Office’s problems are two-fold, according to Donahoe. “The situation is this,” he said. “Number one, volume has dropped. People pay their bills online. So we lost about 25 percent of our volume in the last five years. Now our people have done a nice job taking costs to balance that out. The other issue we’re faced with is we’re required by law to pre-fund retirement health care for people who haven’t retired yet to the tune of $5.5 billion a year. That’s what’s hurting us from a financial standpoint. So as the volume dropped, we have not been able to make this payment.”

Privatization of the Postal Service has been a topic of discussion for years, but the issue is delivering to the areas the U.S.P.S. does. “We’re required by law to provide universal service to the American public at a universal price,” he said. “(FedEx and UPS) are great companies. But there are many parts of the country that FedEx and UPS don’t deliver, but maybe two times

Read more: U.S. Postmaster General: “We’re facing our own fiscal cliff” – CBS News.